Operations Management

Operations Management

1) Coordinating the relationships between mutually supportive but separate organisations.

Recently there has been a dramatic surge in the outsourcing of parts and services that had previously been produced internally. This has been encouraged by the availability of fast, inexpensive communications. A new breed of contract manufacturers that specialise in performing focused manufacturing activities now exists. The success of this kind of traditional outsourcing has led companies to consider outsourcing other major corporate functions such as information systems, product development and design, engineering services, packaging, testing, and distribution. The ability to coordinate these activities is a significant challenge for the operations manager of the future.

2) Optimising global supplier, production, and distribution networks.

The implementation of global enterprise resource planning systems, now common in large companies, has challenged managers to use all of this information. This requires a careful understanding of where control should be centralised and where autonomy is important, among other issues. Companies have only begun to take advantage of the information from these systems to optimally control such resources as inventory, transportation and production equipment.

3) Managing customer touch points.

As companies strive to become superefficient, they often scrimp on customer support personnel (and training) required to effectively staff service departments, help lines, and checkout counters. This leads to the frustrations we all have experienced such as being placed in call-center limbo seemingly for hours, getting bad advice when finally interacting with a company rep, and so on. The issue here is to recognise that making resource utilisation decisions must capture the implicit costs of lost customers as well as the direct costs of staffing.

4) Raising senior management awareness of operations and supply chain management...